It’s hard not to get the sense that just about everyone in the media business wants to be YouTube. That doesn’t mean traditional media companies and streamers seek to wholly abandon premium content for user-generated content, but Nielsen’s latest “The Gauge” numbers tell an appropriately scary story as we all prepare for Halloween: Alphabet’s Google juggernaut now sucks up 14.2% of monthly TV viewing, up from 13.4% a year ago. And this being a zero-sum game, that means the viewing across rival platforms generally declined, with Disney down to 8.9% from 9.4% as Skydance’s Paramount unit dropped to 6.5% from 7% and its Warner Bros. Discovery unit declined to 5.3% from 6.1%. Even combined under the new Skydance, that’s 11.8% and still well below YouTube. Netflix, which just this week disclosed it will implement its first major round of layoffs since 2022, has also struggled to maintain its share, down to 7.8% vs. 8.8% one year ago – a more than 11% drop in viewership that tells you why its stock is down 40% over the last year as well. Interestingly, Fox’s success with live sports and its free Tubi AVOD/FAST platform has jettisoned the company in the opposite direction of its traditional media peers as it rose to 7.8% of total TV viewing from only 6.5% one year ago. (Watch out, Netflix.) Yes, Nielsen is working on a new methodology for The Gauge, which has drawn much criticism from certain media players in recent months for how it calculates all of these numbers. However, the fact remains that YouTube has dominated the landscape without spending a penny on content and, aside from its YouTube Premium subscriptions revenue, subsisting almost wholly on advertising that supports free UGC, much of which is now cheaply generated by artificial intelligence. Slop or not, it tosses even more ad dollars YouTube’s way. No wonder that Fox, whose free Tubi offers a high-quality, YouTube-like experience with a small but increasing ratio of UGC mixed with its premium base, has been able to drive higher viewership metrics amid synergies with its strong live sports and news brands.
Of course, viewership isn’t only for bragging rights; it obviously fuels higher advertising rates and fills inventory across the board inside of broad, 360-degree deals. It’s a big pot: WARC Media’s Q3 forecast projects global ad spending up 11.9% to $1.34 trillion in 2026, with streaming and “VOD” rising 15.1% to $48.4 billion. It expects social media ad revenue to grow 21.3% to $394.6 billion, with Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta expected to rake in nearly 60% of total global ad revenue outside of China. And Madison Avenue, trained by YouTube, now only responds to a mix of broad reach and granular targeting that its brands can link directly to sales through provable metrics. That’s a fact that seemed clear during Advertising Week in New York this week as Walmart’s Vizio smart-TV unit touted its more than 400 live and local channels featuring 45,000 movies and shows while also highlighting 20% year-over-year growth of its Vizio operating system that now reaches 32 million active devices. This is all as viewing hours on its WatchFree+ FAST platform rose 58% YOY in the first half of 2026. Amid this horn tooting, Walmart Connect also announced it will shift from selling performance ads to suppliers to selling streaming ads to non-endemic advertisers under the Vizio and Vibe.co banners. Walmart paid $2.3 billion for Vizio in late 2024 and $1.4 billion for Vibe.co in August this year, so it’s keen to start leveraging them more forcefully with advertisers, and according to AdWeek, Walmart Connect SVP and GM Ryan Mayward this week argued the strategic shift would give the company access to “thousands” of brands that don’t sell at Walmart today. And just to demonstrate how much the ad world has changed, TikTok opened Ad Week with announcements extending access to its third-party ad network that covers nearly 400,000 apps that brands can tap via TikTok Ads Manager, which it has rebranded as the “TikTok Ad Network.” The company also added Buy Direct for in-app purchases and a Shopping Assistant, expanded Smart+ automation to search ads, and enabled access through Model Context Protocol integrations with several AI platforms, including Perplexity and Anthropic’s Claude but also Chinese firms such as open-source model Kimi and Tencent’s WorkBuddy agentic app.
Next? Things are moving fast, and advertisers now have so many choices between platforms and measurement vehicles that smarter, agentic buying could become the wave of the future, which is why so many sellers are scrambling to hyper-automate their platforms. Nielsen, meanwhile, spent its Ad Week talking about its plans to launch a new suite of cross-platform audience measurement products in 2027 to combine its national TV panels and Big Data with first-party streaming data from publishers. It will even include an AI-powered natural language interface. But Nielsen hasn’t really given details or announced firm dates, so Madison Avenue, which has long expressed frustration with the iconic measurement firm, will likely take a “we’ll believe it when we see it” stance into next year. The bottom line is that the ad tech is evolving, the competition for an ever-growing pot of ad gold is fierce, and yes… at the end of the day, everyone wants to be like YouTube, albeit in their own ways. This could get interesting.
